The present invention relates to fishing rods, and more particularly is concerned with the provision of a fishing rod having line guides or other rod implements affixed thereto by rod wraps instead of thread windings.
Conventionally, a fishing rod is provided with line guides spaced along the reach of the rod and a line eye, the tip top, at the end of the rod to extend the line along the rod when it is in use. These line guides may be eyelets or simple wire loops having suitable opposing flattened ends or feet, which lie against the rod and are held in place by wraps of thread about the rod. Such a wrap is usually formed by winding a nylon thread or other thread about the rod and upon the foot of a line guide with turns of the thread lying side by side in a neat appearing arrangement. The thread is held tight during the wrapping and the pressure of the resulting wrap tightly holds the line guide in place. After such a wrap has been wound upon a rod, it is covered by one or more protective coats of a high quality varnish, resin or lacquer. In addition to the rod wraps which hold the line guides in place, other short wraps may be spaced along the rod to reinforce rod ferrules, to secure other implements such as hookkeepers, and to improve the appearance of the rod.
The wrapping of fishing rods is a manual operation requiring a high degree of skill and often it takes several years of experience before an operator can attain suitable skill and sufficient speed to be productive. Thus, these rod wrapping operations are expensive and amount to a substantial portion of the cost of the rod. With the present turbulent labor situation, a real problem exists in finding, training and hiring and keeping good wrappers. As a result, various expedients have been proposed to mechanize wrapping operations or to find a suitable substitute for such wraps. For example, it has been suggested that a plastic sleeve could be used as a substitute for a wrap and such a sleeve could be fitted upon a rod by heat shrinking so that it will attain sufficient tightness as to hold it in place. This desirable result has not been attained and sleeves of this type have not proved workable in practice in that it has been found that a sleeve of a type of plastic suitable for a shrink fit and which can be shrunk into place by heat will not have sufficient strength to hold a line guide in place and will not grip the rod with sufficient tightness so as to prevent it from slipping. Similar considerations would apply to those materials capable of being chemically dilated and then "shrunk" through solvent evaporation. A rod wrap must grip the rod and the foot of a guide so tightly and with such a degree of firmness that neither the wrap nor the foot under it will slip or otherwise move even when the rod is abused.
A glueing of a rod wrap in place has been proposed but the materials forming a rod will not easily accept a glue, or adhesive, and again tight gripping of the rod is not attained. Moreover, it is desirable that a rod wrap have a slight degree of flexibility on the rod, although not so much flexibility as to detract from the firmness of the connection. Accordingly, most rods manufactured today still are hand wrapped even though the operation is expensive, and labor problems limit the production of such rods.